<p>how useful are your high school textbooks at tech?</p>
<p>like, for AP calc bc, physics b, and chem, i have textbooks.</p>
<p>i know that at caltech, as a freshmen, ur expected to know all the material that was covered in those classes. but if you forgot some of it, do the caltech textbooks (for freshmen year) do a decent job of covering some of those more elementary topics or do they only focus on the more advanced topics?</p>
<p>Your high school textbooks will be almost useless. Most freshman classes start out from first principles so you won’t have to worry about that sort of stuff. Every math class certainly starts off with the fundamentals and things like classical mechanics start with newton’s law or electricity start out with gauss’ law.</p>
<p>Bottom line: your old textbooks in my opinion won’t be worth the extra weight of carrying them around to tech</p>
<p>What about texts that we may not be taking related courses in?</p>
<p>I.e. Norvig’s Paradigms of AI - Case Studies in Common Lisp, or language references (C#/C++/C/PHP/etc)</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, may other books may be useful at Tech, it’s just high school course textbooks which might not be so helpful.</p>
<p>You cited several good examples of texts which may be useful depending on what classes you’ll be taking or what research you’ll be doing. A language reference is particularly useful if you’re planning on doing some programming either on your spare time, for the few programming classes, or for research in any field.</p>
<p>Last year (when I was a frosh) I found my multivariable calc. book to be a good quick reference, since in Ph 1bc (analytical) we used lots of the stuff.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that you can also always borrow other’s textbooks. omgninja is right that the ph 1bc does tend to rely more heavily on calc than some frosh are prepared for, but there are plenty of upperclassmen/frosh in prac math classes with useful textbooks.</p>
<p>As a general rule, reference type books tend to be useful, teaching type books tend to not.</p>
<p>sounds like a good rule of thumb. thanks =)</p>
<p>I remember a lot of people, including myself, brought high school textbooks from home. Some even brought along encyclopedias and dictionaries. </p>
<p>They were great dust collectors for the next few months. </p>
<p>If you want to bring along a textbook which you intend on studying, then by all means do so. That’s a good idea. </p>
<p>If you want to bring along a textbook as reference, it’s a waste of time and space.</p>
<p>Edit: Just realized my advice is the exact opposite of alleya’s.</p>
<p>I personally disagree with some of the posts above. For instance, I found Apostol to be a good book on analytical math, but sometimes I just needed to know how to do something in particular (e.g., how to integrate a particular function). In that case Apostol was totally useless, and I got what I needed by falling back on Anton/Bivens/Davis.</p>
<p>Also, in context of relearning stuff that you’ve learned in high school, you may find that the prof is explaining something you’ve learned already, but from a different approach; if that approach doesn’t make sense right away, it’s sometimes helpful to revisit the approach that you learned in high school. Then, when you can understand the final result that one way, it becomes easier to understand it the prof’s way. For instance, I think Purcell is a great E&M book, but sometimes I got a little confused or I thought Purcell was incomplete on a particular subject, and I wished that I had Halliday/Resnick/Walker with me. (Yes, I know the library has copies of that book, but sometimes I feel too lazy to go.)</p>
<p>Halliday/Resnick/Walker is sheer awesomeness within a crimson-red hardcover.</p>
<p>Yay, Halliday/Resnick/Walker. Has anyone ever seen the Kinetic Karnival of Jearl Walker video series, where Jearl Walker dips his hand in molten lead to demonstrate the Leidenfrost effect and talks about how masculine he is? Caltech should hire him away from Cleveland State.</p>